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SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service now has more than 4.6 million users worldwide, the company wrote in a post on X on the last day of 2024.
In a report filed with the Federal Communications Commission in August 2024, Starlink said it had grown to around 1.4 million subscribers in the US since its debut in 2021. That only makes up about 1% of all internet connections in the country, but it’s been a godsend for people in rural areas.
“People buy a house out here and they assume that there’s internet, and then they find out there’s not,” Edwin Walker, a retired electrical engineer in Chattaroy, Washington, told CNET. “There’s literally a couple hundred people close to us who have Starlink.”
2024 was a year of rapid growth for the satellite internet company. It started the year with 2.3 million customers globally and ended with 4.6 million.
In November, Starlink started putting customers on a waitlist in US cities like Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego and Austin. It also added a one-time “congestion fee” of $100 for customers in high-usage areas.
There’s been some concern about whether Starlink can keep up with increasing service demand. The FCC defines broadband as 100 megabits per second download and 20Mbps upload. That’s a bar Starlink has never reached in the US.
The most recent data from Ookla in 2023 found that Starlink users in the US receive 65/10Mbps on average, with 58 milliseconds of latency. (Disclosure: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
In its three years of collecting speed test data on Starlink, the company has never reached the benchmark set by the FCC. The closest it got was the last quarter of 2021 when it hit 105/12Mbps.
Read more: Inside the Rise of 7,000 Starlink Satellites – and Their Inevitable Downfall
In 2022, Starlink was denied nearly $900 million in broadband grants through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) because it couldn’t meet the FCC’s speed requirements. Elon Musk wrote on X in January 2024 that the idea that Starlink had failed to reach these speeds was “utterly false” and that “Starlink exceeds that right now.”
The current FCC chair, Brendan Carr, said it was unlikely the commission could revisit the RDOF subsidies for Starlink but told Politico in October that he believes “it would be fair to get [Starlink] back” into the FCC’s broadband program.
Watch this: Starlink Satellites Are Bringing Internet to Millions. We’ll Explain the Pros and Cons
